Counterfeit World Read Online Free PDF Page B

whole evening. Oddly, though, he didn’t get a load on.”
    “Then he was concerned about something?”
    “Nothing I could put my finger on, although I noticed he definitely wasn’t himself. Kept going off on the philosophical end.”
    “About researching and improving human relations?”
    “Oh, no—nothing like that. But—well, to be frank, he imagined that his work with Reactions was beginning to pay off with what he called ‘basic discovery.’”
    “What sort of discovery?”
    “He wouldn’t say.”
    Here was verification of a sort. Lynch, too, had spoken of Fuller’s “secret information” that he had hoped to save for me. Now I was certain Lynch had actually come to Siskin’s party, that we had had our talk in the roof garden.
    I lit my second cigarette.
    “Why are you so interested in all this, Doug?”
    “Because I don’t think Fuller’s death was an accident.”
    After a moment he said solemnly, “Look, son. I’m aware of all the elements that made up the Siskin-Fuller feud—allocation of sociological research time and all that. But really now, you don’t think Siskin was so desperate as to want to bodily remove—”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Of course you didn’t. And you’d better make certain you don’t—ever. Siskin is a powerful, vindictive man.”
    I replaced my empty glass on the bar. “On the other hand, Fuller could find his way around blindfolded in the guts of the function generators. He’d be the last to walk into a high tension lead.”
    “A normal, not overly-eccentric Fuller, yes. Not Fuller as I knew him during those last couple of weeks.”
    Collingsworth finally got around to his straight shot. Then he thudded the glass on the bar and relit his pipe. The glow from the bowl made his features seem less intense. “I think I can guess what Fuller’s ‘basic discovery’ was.”
    I tensed. “You can?”
    “Sure. I’d bet it had a lot to do with his attitude toward the subjective reaction units in his simulator. If you remember, he more often than not referred to them as ‘real people.’”
    “But he was just being facetious.”
    “Was he? I can remember him saying, ‘Damn it! We’re not going to factor any analog pollsters into this setup!’”
    I explained, “He planned it so that we wouldn’t have to use interrogating units to poll opinion in our machine. He settled for a different system—audiovisual stimuli, such as billboards, handbills, contrived videocasts. We sample reaction by looking in on empathy-surveillance circuits.”
    “ Why no pollsters in Fuller’s counterfeit world?” he asked.
    “Because actually it’s more efficient without them. And we’ll be getting a true reflection of social behavior minus the annoying factor of oral opinion sampling.”
    “That’s the theory. But how many times did you hear Fuller say, ‘I’m not going to have my little people harassed by any damned busybodies’?”
    He had a point. Even I suspected that Fuller had fancied an unwarranted degree of sentience on the part of the ID units he was programming into his simulator.
    Collingsworth spread his hands and smiled. “I believe Fuller’s ‘basic discovery’ was that his reaction entities weren’t merely ingenious circuits in a simulectronic complex, but instead were real, living, thinking personalities. In his opinion, I’m sure, they actually existed. In a solipsistic world, perhaps, but never suspecting that their past experiences were synthetic, that their universe wasn’t a good, solid, firm, materialistic one.”
    “ You don’t believe anything like—”
    His amused eyes relayed fitful reflections from a cigarette lighter that flared nearby. “My boy, I’m a pure psychologist-behaviorist leanings. My philosophy tracks that line closely. But you, Fuller, and all the other simulectronicists are a queer breed. When you start mixing psychology with electronics and sprinkle in a liberal dose of probability conditioning, you’re bound to